By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Eskom has announced that load shedding will escalate to Stage 6 on Tuesday night, after six generating units suffered breakdowns over the past 24 hours.
Load shedding will initially jump to Stage 5 from noon on Tuesday, until 21:00. From there Stage 6 will run until 05:00 on Wednesday. From there, Stage 5 would continue until further notice.
The need to push load shedding up from stage 4 resulted from six generating units suffering breakdowns in the last 24 hours, said Eskom.
The company said a generating unit each at Duvha and Hendrina has not yet returned to service.
“In addition, a generating unit at Matla and Amot had been returned to service. There is a delay in returning a generating unit each at Duvha, Jendal, Grootvlei and Kriel power stations.”
This week is meant to bring with it the revealing of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ’emergency package’ of measures to mitigate load shedding, according to Fikile Mbalula, the ANC secretary general.
Rampant rolling blackouts have pushed the ANC to finally consider declaring a national disaster over the energy crisis.
Ramaphosa, in an ANC strategy meeting this morning (31 January), he said: “Work is already underway within government to establish whether the legal requirements of a national state of disaster are met and what specific actions we would be empowered to undertake.”
Declaring a state of disaster may bring with it the fast-tracking of spending and implementing certain regulations.
Fast-tracking new projects and cutting through unnecessary red tape holding back power generation projects has however been a staple of presidents overall plan to mitigate load shedding.
For access to other load shedding schedules, Eskom has made them available on loadshedding.eskom.co.za.
Smartphone users can also download the app EskomSePush to receive push notifications when load shedding is implemented, as well as the times the area you are in will be off.